‘Daily Math’

100 is a great number, and it’s even better if it’s your age — and you’re a math teacher. Madeline Scotto just turned 100 years old last week, and is still working 3 days a week as a math-team coach. It just goes to show that it’s fun to play with numbers at any age.

Of all the animals who blend into what’s around them using shape and color, the leaf-tailed gecko might be one of the coolest. It lives on the island of Madagascar, and looks just like the way it sounds: with a tail that looks like a leaf. And that’s not the only cool thing about it.

If you’ve ever played with a calculator, you might have seen that some screens make the numbers using all straight lines, and those numbers look like letters when turned upside down. But even when they stay right side up, numbers made of sticks give you all kinds of games to play.

There are about 320 million Americans – right now, at least. But how many have we ever had? This isn’t the easiest number to figure out. In 2011 one group did just that, though. And the numbers may shock you!

Yes, you’re seeing that picture right: it shows a man sitting inside a fuzzy, claw-shaped slipper. The slipper was a big accident, made wrong when Tom Boddingham tried to order one slipper in a different size from the other. We doubt he wanted it to be that much bigger, but it definitely makes a nice sleeping bag!

Back when human beings lived in caves, life wasn’t anything like it is now. Cavemen woke up, hunted animals all day, went to sleep, and the next day they started all over, probably without taking a bath. They definitely didn’t have our cool tools, toys and gadgets. But they did make art!

It’s Columbus Day, when America celebrates Christopher Columbus’ famous 1492 trip across the Atlantic Ocean and discovery of America. Actually, he was looking for what they called the East Indies back then. And he didn’t exactly do the math right, luckily for us!

Tomorrow morning many of us will get to see a lunar eclipse, one of the coolest solar system events you can watch. The Earth will move right between the Sun and Moon to put its own shadow right on the Moon. This will make the Moon turn a cool shade of reddish-orange as it slides into our shadow.

As Halloween nears, we start thinking about ghosts, monsters, and creepy creatures. We also think about more cheerful, colorful things like pumpkins, too. So what better way to celebrate than to make a monster out of pumpkins?